Parents' sent me home from their place w/ something I forgot I had bought at a yard sale forever ago: a Dungeons and Dragons Red Box. Still has what appears to be the original dice, and a solo adventure book w/ magic ink markers that more than likely don't work after 30 years! It also had a piece of paper from when I convinced a high school friend to roll a character and fight a snake (though I don't remember this at all...)

I am getting the same feeling I remember getting every other time I've looked at that box: I want to play this. But I never have.

Context/TLDR: Nualia was the Big Bad of this chapter, which is a prewritten campaign for Pathfinder called Rise of the Runelords. Nualia's trying to make herself more powerful, so she gathered up the various goblin tribes in the area and had them attack the town of Sandpoint, where my group is from. The high body count would have pleased her god, Lamashtu (the god of monsters), but my players put a stop to her plans by tracking her to her base on Thistletop and having her throat ripped out by a fuckin eagle.

They descended the stairs into Thistletop Dungeon level 2, bringing along Orik, the mercenary they met on level 1. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse: work for us and maybe live a little longer, or die like a coward in his bed. I'm still not sure if he made the right decision. As soon as they entered the first room, Sir Onyxarm knew the ground wasn't safe. All but Orik failed their reflex save as the ground gave way beneath them and they fell into the flooded chamber below. They spent a few rounds trying to sling a rope up to Orik so they could climb back up, but after failing too many times (Sir Onyxarm had to remove all of his armor to make the swim check, so we had a naked dwarf swimming around), they told Orik to just climb down with them.

As Orik is climbing down, they notice the huge golden helmet submerged in the corner. They soon realized it was the home of a giant hermit crab, and the battle began. It ended spectacularly with Trigg jumping from the barbarian's shoulders onto the crab, who had botched on an attack role and lost his helmet, and crit with her horsechopper, splitting it down the middle.

Just as the battle ended, Orik finally climbed down and made is way over, sword drawn and out of breath, "Hey guys what did I miss?"

As they studied the helmet for a quick appraisal, they noticed something shiny inside the giant crab. Each of them, one by one, reached in and pulled out a magical weapon. For Vaddok, a Longsword of Shocks. For Trigg, a Fiery Cutlass. For Cathran, a Frozen Bow, and for Sir Onyxarm, two returning throwing axes. (I added this whole encounter with the cave-in and the magic weapons because I knew the shadows in the next room were going to make short work of them, since none of them had any magic weapons. Also, the Crab of Requirement made me laugh.)

They made their way up the stairs and through the hidden door to the crypt, where Orik was quickly attacked by three shadows, bringing his strength down to 5. Sir Onyxarm won on initiative and threw his new axes in a wide arc, hitting all three shadows, and destroying two of them on the first turn. The barbarian made quick work of the last shadow with a thunderous blow from his new longsword.

Out of the crypt and around the corner they encountered the pillar of greed. They couldn't quite puzzle out what to do with the coin slots they found, so they decided to move on to the next room, where they encountered Nualia and her Yeth Hound. After a little monologuing from Nualia, the PCs attacked. Vaddok got a little too excited, using the dwarf's back as a springboard, but only manged to knock Trigg prone and miss on his attack. Sir Onyxarm said two can play at that game and jumped between Nualia and the Yeth Hound (which I only realized afterwards would have triggered an attack of opportunity - oh well), and flanked Nualia. After a few rounds being shaken by the Yeth Hound's howl, Cathran summoned an eagle that tore out Nualia's throat. After she and her hound were dead, they decided to rest a bit before trying the pillar again.

They decided they might be over thinking the pillar, so they put 1gp in each coin slot (1,2,3,4,5? That's the same combination on my luggage!), causing the pillar to noisily descend. They saw and heard the faded hologram of Karzoug, found the 7 pointed key, and opened Malfeshnekor's prison.

Malfeshnekor, alone for the last few thousand years, didn't mind a little conversation with the PCs before he attempted to kill them, so he gave them a little exposition. Then, desperate for either death or the next best thing (food), he attacked them with crushing despair. All but Sir Onyxarm failed their will saves, and Orik ran like the coward he is. After some buffs from Cathran and a few crits from the rest of the party, he was easily put down with a satisfied smile on his decapitated head.

On their way out of the dungeon, they came across the fleeing Orik just in time to see him set off a trap and get chopped into ribbons. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The mission completed, our heroes made their way back to the top level of Thistletop, greeted by Shelalu, Sheriff Hemlock, and a troop of soldiers newly acquired from Magnimar. The bodies of the rest of the Thistletop goblins burning in one huge funeral pyre.

Assuming this cold goes away, playing Dread for the first time this Saturday. Character generation's fun - you build up your skills and personality in responses to a questionnaire the person hosting the game creates, in keeping with the broad story they have in mind. So I got to answer questions like "Does anyone else know what you do on the side for money?" and "Is your 4-F status legitimate?" and "Are those gaps in your memory from an injury, or some kind of mental condition?"

@steerpike That's pretty cool. I might have to see if I can wrangle a select few into trying it at some point. Let us know how it goes.

@Scrymgeour Gotta love some Blood Angels. Green stuff for hand made banners on the Dreadnought? Looks like they are coming along well. I never got around to doing a good job on my 40k Space Marines. I guess I was too wrapped up in the impossible task of finishing my horde of greenskins and Fantasy stuff.

@LokiZero "The bodies of the rest of the Thistletop goblins burning in one huge funeral pyre." This is always a great way to know things ended well. ;-) Thanks for the writeup.

So we all survived the Dread game, much to our surprise and our host's dismay. The setup was that it was 1971, we all knew a fixer-type ("Tony Monday") and got sent on a mission to investigate a potential source of gold that would save the U.S. economy. The characters were a Navy helicopter pilot (I *think* he was Navy - he won a Navy Cross), an Army medic, a prominent neo-Satanist, a controversial self-help book author, and me, a photojournalist (who had a problem with occasional gaps in his memory).

I recommend only letting players use one hand for pulls, as the freakin' tower never fell, but I suspect we had a localized failure of physics. I got to threaten a sinister spy type with a hemostat! And also utter the line "Bats are science!" The medic got to do experimental surgery! The controversial self-help author fucked the prominent neo-Satanist when everyone thought he was going to turn into a gold statue!

@Steerpike Thanks for the rundown, sounds like a good time. I'll add this to my games I want to try list.

@Oldhat So weird, a friend of mine just posted the rules and talked about Boss Monster in a gaming group I'm in a couple days ago. It does look really cool. You gotta beer bribe someone into playing it with you and tell us about it.

Just got back from a mini-convention-holiday-...thing with boardgames and RPGs. The absolute standout for everyone there was Fiasco - basically a GM-less RPG system where you grab a bunch of tropes from a "playset" representing a genre/setting, and turn it into a Cohen Brothers film. Rather than designing characters you take turns filling out a set of relationships between adjacent players, add objects/locations/needs to those relationships, work out who the characters must be based on that, then take turns doing free-form scenes centering around your character.The second game I played in used the "Transatlantic" playset (basically off-brand Titanic), in which a young man discovered his eccentric uncle had just married a much younger American woman, and while getting drunk in a dockside bar found himself smuggled aboard the cruise ship by an exuberant French antiques dealer (he was meant to be quiet and Belgian but the player was a little drunk). The newlyweds fell out when it turned out they hadn't been booked into a room together, and the new wife found herself sharing a 1st class berth with the Frenchman, while the young man woke up locked in their closet.Somehow, about three scenes from the end we suddenly wandered off track, a squid-god attacked and the whole thing went Raimi-shaped, but somehow after all the tentacles had died down and we did the final montage, it actually almost fitted together.I recommend Fiasco so hard now it's unreal - one of the best things about it is that it's ideal for one-shots, you're chewing through a fixed number of scenes and all the characters are designed to be killed off (or occasionally happily-ever-aftered) at the end of the film anyway.

Played a few games of Lords of Waterdeep recently, and I've very much enjoyed it every time. I guess I'd describe it as a D&D themed "resource husbanding" game, but without the tendency for players to get bogged down by bad luck, or to completely steamroll their opponents. Every time we've played, the final score has been very close. Plus the turn system is set up in such a way that each player has a good number of tactical options for each move. Highly recommended.

@Curb - Lords Of Waterdeep is among the many euro/worker placement games that I play regularly. It is rather good fun isn't? My friend's housemate is an absolute demon at it though and she tends to kick everyone's ass.

Recent games played include:

Agricola: - another worker placement game, you are running a farm and have to feed your family every turn and make improvements to your farmstead. It is described on Boardgamegeek as being a game for masochists that like punching themselves in the face. It can be a bit mean but it's still enjoyable - you only have two actions per turn and it can be a bit fraught deciding which options to take for the best.

Caylus: - yet anothe worker placement but a bit more forgiving than Agricola.

Tide Of Iron:- We are in the middle of a game (our first) of Tide Of Iron. I'm playing as the US and having to defend an assault from the nazis. As it's our first play-through I'm focussing on learning the mechanics rather than developing tactics so I'm letting my opponent throw himself at my defensive lines and holding reserves behind to mop up after (hopefully) he's exhausted himself. We'll see how it goes tonight when we are due to re-commence.

Twilight Struggle: - I absolutely kicked ass the last time I played Twilight Struggle. I was the USSR and had total domination of Africa, South and Central America and Eastern Europe. While my opponent was concentrating on shoring up his Asian and Western European strongholds, and advances his Space Race track I crept around the edges of the other continents until I had enough influence across the globe (especially afger Fidel Castro appeared) to win by a substantial margin. He demands a re-match though and I reckon he would've learned from his mistakes to make it a lot closer match up.

Right now our group is playing Blood of Heroes, which is the old Mayfair DC Heroes game with a few improvements and the serial numbers filed off. It's struggling a little due to some real life issues, but the concept is pretty neat. It's an original alternate history earth with a feel kind of like Superfriends meets X-Files as written by the folks who write Archer.

Currently in a Pathfinder campaign, as well as Scion. We have a long-standing Scion game going, on hiatus due to work stuff, and took up Pathfinder in the interim. Pathfinder is a sort of return to old-school D&D style games for my group, with an emphasis on competent low-level pc's. Fun so far.

A Mage: The Ascension campaign is coming up soon. Haven't played that game in forever...

I was always interested in Scion. I'll have to take another look. The yellow looks great. It is probably my least favorite color to paint with, I don't have the patience to get it consistently how I want it to look.